New app! Also: Xcode + iOS + iPhone 3G tip. Also: insane idea.

It’s a handy little app that lets you compare equivalent prices for different volumes of beer. Interesting? Maybe. In all honesty, I whipped this app up real quick for the following reasons:

It uses the new accurate UISlider subclass I’ve been working on (which I will open source soon!)

It has an iAd. Ooh or eew? I don’t know yet.

I’m trying something new to help increase my skills. It’s kind of like Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week. I intend to write and publish a new app every week for the next year. What?

That last item seems like it might be a doozy. Not every app is going to be a winner. Apple may kick me out for generating too much crapware. Most will be free or iAd supported. Some might be decent.

There is a lot of doubt entwined with this idea. But here is something about which I don’t have much doubt: writing and releasing an app a week will stretch all parts of my development skillset, from writing code to understanding design patterns to designing icons to submitting and packaging. We’ll see how this goes. App #1 is done, app #2 is waiting to be reviewed and app #3 is nearing completion. Also, I haven’t forgotten about Lens•Lab! I’ll count an update of that as part of an app a week.

Oh, and the Xcode + iOS + iPhone 3G tip is this: when you create a new project in Xcode 4.2, the plist for your app has a entry called “armv7” in the “Required device capabilities” section.

If your app targets iOS 4.2.1 and lower, you MUST remove this entry to support armv6 (the processor variant in the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, and 1st and 2nd generations of iPod Touch.) I just found this out this morning and an update to The Beer Nerd’s Olde Volume Equivalence Calculator has been submitted to Apple!